“What Dante Means to Me” is the title of an essay by T.S. Eliot published in his To Criticize the Critic, originally given as a lecture. 2016 recipient of the prestigious Balzan Prize Boitani has adopted Eliot’s title to indicate that he, too, will reconstruct the story of his own relationship with Dante.

Philosophers typically attribute the foundation of modern thought to René Descartes, who in his Discours de la méthode (1637) extensively deploys metaphors of “founding” for his theory of how the edifice of knowledge is regrounded on the clear and distinct certainty of the cogito: “I think, therefore I am.” Cultural historians sometimes locate a remoter starting point for mode

Grave robbing, hidden bones, empty tombs, exhumation, sacred dust—Dante’s Immortal Remains assembles these and other pieces of Dante’s lively skeletal history, from his burial in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006.

Dante is often characterized as the pioneer of a European vernacularization movement that had in fact been going on long enough for him to take his distance from it. This paper considers Dante’s engagement with antiquity against the background of the contradictory impulses of foreignization and domestication in the translating practices of his day.

The lecture attempts to define and account for the innovative literary features of Dante’s youthful masterpiece, the Vita nova. In particular, it examines its primary sources, its structure, and its imposing metaliterary and self-reflective character.
A reception will follow the lecture.

This lecture explored Dante’s privilege to travel through Hell unharmed and why at certain points, namely at the gates of Dis (Inferno 8-9), this writ is not honored.
Learn more about the speaker: Justin Steinberg, University of Chicago

Reading Dante’s poem, one is struck by the natural images used, from the wood at the beginning to the sun and stars at the very end. Does Dante employ a “method” with these images? What do they mean? And does their meaning change from Inferno to Purgatorio and Paradiso?

Dante the Abolitionist: African-American Appropriations of the Italian Poet in the Nineteenth Century
Dennis Looney, University of Pittsburgh
Learn more about the Center for Renaissance Studies Dante Lectures.

Access to Authority: Dante in the Epistle to CangrandeAlbert Russell Ascoli, Northwestern University (now at the University of California, Berkeley)
Learn more about the Center for Renaissance Studies Dante Lectures.

The Eunoe and the Regaining of the Last Good
Dino Cervigni, University of Notre Dame (now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Learn more about the Center for Renaissance Studies Dante Lectures.

Il cantor dei bucolici carmi: The Influence of Virgilian Pastoral on Dante’s Depiction of Earthly Paradise
Caron Cioffi, University of Chicago
Learn more about the Center for Renaissance Studies Dante Lectures.